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This far outstrips the 650Mb capacity of a CD and the 9.4Gb of DVD and compares favourably with the largest, 120Gb hard drives around at the moment.

The discs use the same red laser technology as CDs and DVDs, but cram in the extra data with a technique called near-field optics, which reduces the size of the 'mark' that the laser makes on the disk to record each piece of data.

Disc manufacturer Ritek is backing the research and is looking to have a commercial product available in 2005 or 2006. A similar project by Matsushita recently developed a disc capable of storing 50Gb on both sides of a disc, but uses a violet laser. The advantage of the red laser technology is that the drives that read and write these discs will also be able to read and write CDs and DVDs.